“Nothing. Nothing will work. There is no general model for newspapers to replace the one the internet just broke.” Cold, Clay, that’s so cold. And I’m not even sure whether it’s colder to the newspaper industry or to the former consumers of the newspapers. The fledgling business person in me (one year of business school under my belt with an otherwise largely fact and figure free 8 year career…) immediately thought about the dynamics of consumer behavior. Shirkey’s right, people are clearly not willing to pay for newspaper content just shifted to a digital format, but what is the substitute for a once perfectly profitable endeavor here?

I acknowledge that Shirkey has contextualized the disruption of newspapers as part of a greater revolution and therefore asserts you can’t make projections about how this will all shake out. What’s interesting and potentially quite dark, are the implications in what and how quickly different aspects of newspapers have been substituted – basically what the internet breaks here and what it does or makes better.

Shirkey points out in his blog and in the piece with Anderson and Bell that we can be certain that at the very least, at its existential core, the internet substitutes a way to get material from a private source to the public writ large. This is the essence of the Groundswell, that individuals (or institutions) can now get or convey what they need to other people directly. The first order effect of that on the economics of newspapers specifically, was that advertisers can get their information to consumers in a much more targeted, effective, and affordable way. Newspapers lost nearly all their value as a marketing tool – and it turns out that from an objective economic perspective, that was actually where all the value society put in newspapers.

But what about they other things newspapers also did? And why don’t we as a society value those things? As Nicco pointed out, newspapers, through their controlled access to the public, also focused the attention of the public. That, more than anything is what I think Shirkey is getting at when he talks about it being impossible to know how this revolution will end. Is this the end of a collective societal attention span? And therefore is it also the end of any kind of shared conception of events or culture? Maybe. Shirkey’s right, I can’t say.

There are more things that newspapers did though. They also hold power accountable, they provide a platform for contextualizing information and actions of society players, they construct the common narrative of what has and is happening. These are the things that Shirkey means when he says that we don’t need newspapers but we do need journalism. But what happens when the substitute for that, for journalism, is just anything that is entertaining to people on the internet? What happens when society doesn’t realize they need journalism and investigation of power and mechanisms for accountability? What happens when no one provides the context because we don’t value it enough? This is actually the thing that is breaking in the disruption. If free markets and capitalism are to be trusted, the message here is that we don’t think we need journalism or a rigorous accounting of facts and events by trained, trusted professionals. We don’t value analysis, or context, or due diligence, we will take the word of the people shouting loudest, or closest, or saying the most familiar things. Because that is what is substituting true journalism.

I spent a day canvassing in New Hampshire for another class, the assignment being to see what gets people motivated to be involved in actual campaigns – most of the day was spent knocking on doors for HRC, but on a whim we also visited the Trump office. The thing that most struck me in the long conversations I had with the Trump supporters, was that most of them talked about how they were able to do research and find out the facts themselves. They were proud that they weren’t just going to be feed information by the same news networks, they were figuring out a way around what they clearly thought of as conspiracy. They talked about how important it is not to just trust one source of information, that you need to get the whole story. I agreed with that principal of seeking independent sources of information. The critical difference is the understanding of why you can trust the alternative sources. We still need at least a common idea of what is credible, why something can be believed or trusted. These people clearly had an entirely different conception of what is and has even happened in this country. And that is the tragedy in the diminution of journalism as a profession and service to society. A friend told me that when she was researching conflict resolution, one of the things she took away is that a prerequisite for conflict resolution is that both sides have to have a common understanding of the actual events that occur. And I don’t know that that is possible with the loss of true journalism.

 

**If I had more time or concern, I would try to work through all the calling of Trump supporters as “these people” etc, but that’s what they felt and sounded like to me. Let’s just agree that I sound condescending and unempathetic and promise to work on it in the future for the sake of learning and understanding…